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Meeting time Wednesday February 5th  2014 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday February 6th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday February 6th, 2014 noon Malaysian time, Thursday 6th February, 2014 02:00am Rio Standard Time.

Attendees

Invitees:

Anjum-, Hassaan Khaliq, Kashif+, Raja+, Johari+, Nara, Abdullah, Badrul-, Ridzuan+, Hanan, Saqib+, Adib+, Les+, Renan-, Bebo

+ Confirmed attendance

On 6th February, Saqib is traveling to his home city. However, he will try to get an internet connection.

- Responded but  Unable to attend: 

Actual attendees: 

Johari, Hassaan, Kashif, Raja, Les 

Administration

  • Johari proposes that UTM host a PingER workshop in 2014, maybe associated with another conference. Anjum will be in Malaysia then. Saqib will meet met  Hanan Jan 9th and discuss discussed this. After the meeting Johari sent email to the Les, Hanan, Saqib, Badrul, and Adib with the issues and suggesting a skype meeting
    • UTM volunteered to host the workshop last year.  Due to the lack of funding from UTM, UM hosted it.  Hanan believes the constraint is the budget.  After knowing how can we fund the workshop, then we can decide who will the host the workshop. 

    • Adib suggested a summer school that is aimed at graduate students and researchers from different disciplines where everyone needs to be present for team presentations based on case studies/assignments given to each team. Each team will be mentored by one professional researcher (from PingER Current Member) to guide and advise. The Summer School activities will include: Keynote talk, Presentations on current projects related to Pinger that open up challenges for students to solve and address, and case studies (assignments based on the presentations) for each team of students.

  • Anjum plans to be at UM by January 28th, we all hope he has his visa by then.

Renan

    • Johari talked to Adib who is interested in hosting the workshop at UUM. They believe that with Anjum in Malaysia, the main cost is for Les. Johari shared the information from the previous 2 workshops and it is believed it is good value for money. Given this, it appears the funding required is achievable. There may also be a possibility for a presentation by Les to a more public audience at the ITU Research Center, as well as the possibility of getting sponsors and requiring a registration fee for private sector people. Adib will put together a proposal and take it to the UUM Vice Chancellor. 

Renan

Renan has contacted the admin (Vinicius) for the UFRJ PingER monitor, to see if it can be restored to a working state. Vinicius Renan has contacted the admin (Vinicius) for the UFRJ PingER monitor, to see if it can be restored to a working state. Vinicius explained they went through infrastructure changes and there are some important hardware pieces missing, which is delaying the process. Vinicius explained that hopefully around mid-February they should have the necessary hardware so they can reinstall the systems and PingER program.

Renan has provided a 4 page Appendix on PingERLOD to the ICFA report.  This is also available at PingER LOD OverviewRenan is testing Virtuoso which is free to see if it can overcome the slowness of the current PingERLOD. He plans to be done in the next 2 weeks. If this does not work we may need to look into a tool that costs moneystarted testing Virtuoso last weekend. He now has the data in an easily exchangeable format so he can transfer it from the earlier repository  he was using (OWLIM) to the new one (Virtuoso). That is what he is  trying to do this week: upload to the Virtuoso database. The main problem for me is that he can use only 2 hours a day to work, because of his job.

Renan is looking at submitting a paper or poster for a Big Data and Social Computing conference that will be held at Stanford: He is pretty sure he can argue that we have made  nice contributions for social computing using (big) data handling technologies. He will discuss with his professor at Rio so she can help him with advice. Bebo will look at the conference information and the deadline to verify its relevance. Renan will look into whether he can get financial assistance to attend.  Bebo has looked at the conference and believes a posters submission would be good. Renan talked to his supervisor, Luiza and she suggested him to get in touch with another professor at UFRJ who also has experience in submitting papers for international conferences. She also has experience in big data, especially working with scientific data. This new professor, called Marta, said she can help Renan with writing and submitting for the Stanford Big Data Conference. We would need to submit a 10-pages-2-columns paper, focusing on Big Data processing (and maybe analysis), trying to also give some ‘scientific content’ approach, because this is Marta’s field of research. The due date for the paper submission is March 1st.

 It would be good if somebody else was able to work with Renan to  move It would be good if somebody else was able to work with Renan to  move PingER LOD forward. However we think the performance issue has to be resolved first.

UM

Ridzuan was unable to attend but sent the following status report: "My progress is that currently I am setting up the Hadoop environment to our UM servers. There have been some installation problems and will take some time to debug and testing Pinger data. We will start using Malaysia pinger data first as a starter. Will inform you the progress in our next meeting."UM appears to be experiencing very high packet losses (>4%). We need help in understanding these. It does not look like simple congestion since the jitter and RTT is staying low. Saqib needs assistance from Badrul as part of his case study of Malaysia.  Badrul writes: "UM is now currently changing the new policy regarding the bandwidth and connection. They are upgrading the switch and router to a new router - mostly every weekend they shut down the network. therefore we are now having some difficulty." Saqib has identified what appear to be losses starting at a JARING router in KL. Badrul will run some mtr traceorute/pings to various sites.  

Badrul plans for his undergraduate student (Abdulrahim Haroun Ali) to have a draft paper on anomalies in PingER measurements to share for review by the end of semester (January).

UM appears to be experiencing very high packet losses (>4%). We need help in understanding these. It does not look like simple congestion since the jitter and RTT is staying low. Saqib needs assistance from Badrul as part of his case study of Malaysia.  Badrul writes: "UM is now currently changing the new policy regarding the bandwidth and connection. They are upgrading the switch and router to a new router - mostly every weekend they shut down the network. therefore we are now having some difficulty." Saqib has identified what appear to be losses starting at a JARING router in KL. Badrul will run some mtr traceorute/pings to various sites.  

Update?

Ridzuan just solved the first part of the installation (Ubuntu servers) and is now starting to configure Apache Hadoop nodes for Pinger data storage. 

Ibrahim Abaker  is planning to work on topic initially entitled " leveraging pingER big data with a modified pingtable for event-correlation and clustering", The purpose of this project is to make Pinger more efficient and more scalable to retrieve and analysis pingER raw data. consequently may improve pinger data store. He is planning to use key-value store model with high expandability and shorter query response time. The benefit of such project will help in the design of real time analysis and distributed pinger data across multiple servers for analysis. Les has sent him a pointer to documentation on the data flow at SLAC and also listings of pingtable.pl and associated script.

 UNIMAS

The tool to enable synchronizing Malaysian monitors is completed. It provides the ability to add, edit and delete nodes. Johari has sent less the URLs  the URL, userid and password to Badrul, Saqib and Les to try it out. Les has not had much time so far only looked at the add form  form and made some suggestions, and edit form - looks good. Johari is working on authentication for the tool. Once that is ready he will send to Badrul and Saqib- looks good. Raja will try it out.

The traceroute server at http://pinger2.unimas.my/cgi-bin/traceroute.pl  has the same problem as before. They know (sort of) the problem but haven't got the chance to rectify it (mapping NAT address, needs to be added). There is no progress 12/4/2013, 1/8/2013, 1.22.2014, 2/5/2014. Now that the historical traceroutes are working for UM (see below) there is an extra incentive to get the reverse traceroute working at UTM and UNIMAS

Custom iso: He can get as far as the boot screen, but is unable to get to the desktop. No progress 2/5/2014. 

Joharis has received the replacement Raspberry Pi. He has installed a 64GB card. Once it is` is setup he will return it to the computer center and see how it goes.No progress 2/5/2014.

Johari has created a shell script to automate the installation of pinger package in Ubuntu/Linux distro and has added Centos 6.2 and earlier versions as well. Next he will test on Fedora 19 and 20. He is using SLAC repo version 2.3 with a virtual box and ubuntu server 13.04 for testing purpose.  Johari Johari has added a page at pinger.unimas.my/pinger website on the usage of a shell script to automate the installation steps for pinger package. It is available at  http://page at pinger.unimas.my/pinger/install-tutorial.php. If any of you have a go at it, please let Johari know whether it works, or if there is any error that you encounter. This might be good for NUST to try out. Kashif has tried it and provided feedback to Johari concerning what versions of Linux distribution it supports.Currently it is based on Ubuntu.  Of the 50 Pakistani hosts none are using Ubuntu. Pakistan is using Fedora and CentOS. Johari plans by the next meeting to have a evrsion ready to try with CentOS in Pakistan website on the usage of a shell script to automate the installation steps for pinger package. It is available at  http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/install-tutorial.php. Johari will check with Kashif to see the version(s) needed for Pakistan to ensure it works  for them. Then Kashif can try it out.

Johari has a research student who finalized a proposal in order to officially apply for his masters.  He will start in February. He is currently working on threshold/anomaly detection, and will extend to correlating performance over multiple routes. He will share the proposal with Les and others in the next 2 weeks to get reviews.

UTM

Saqib has finished his thesis. He is applying for a Postgraduate Research received an email regarding the successful selection of research assistant-ship at UTM where he plans to work on PingER. He is still waiting to hear the result. Update?UTM. However, he is waiting for an official offer letter from research management center.

Saqib is working with the IT department in UTM to solve the problems of delays in traceroute.  They have a new ISP.  Now the pinger server is working with single static IP (161.139.68.188) both for intranet and internet.   Previous internet IP 161.139.146.158 is removed.    Again given the new historical traceroute facility (see below), it is important to get this working.

  • No load balancing is involved as UTM is working with single ISP. 
  • Still the problem of the delay in traceroute is not solved. It appears to be due to the DNS lookup delay.

Saqib has started a case study of Malaysian hosts seen from Malaysian Monitors. the The case study is identifying the need for the Malaysian monitors to collect traceroutes to their target hosts daily. SLAC has  a script to facilitate this, for routes seen from SLAC, that could be adapted for other sites. The latest copy of the word file was shared with Badrul and Johari. No update 2/5/2014.

 UUM

Dec 4, 2013: The director of computer centre has agreed to support this collaboration and already appointed one staff to be with us during the configuration.  Next step, Adib needs to discuss with Prof. Suhaidi to dedicate one PC  OR get  support from Badrul grant to buy one PC for this purpose or have a bake sale and buy a Raspberry Pi.  Adib will do his  best to setup PingER monitoring host at UUM before the end of this year. Adib was not on the meeting. He provided an update by email: "Still waiting to get PC. But they promise to provide one very soon. it is totally beyond my control." Regarding the meeting, Adib will attend the upcoming meetings once UUM pinger host is upup. No update 2/5/2014.

NUST

At the Connect Asia Pacific Summit in Bangkok 2 weeks ago and seeing the  project "Mapping the pan Asia Pacific information Superhighway and closing gaps in infrastructure  connectivity" Shahryar found that very much related to the work in the PingER project. So Shahryar sent email to a UN agency for a possible collaboration with them on PingER project. He has heard nothing so he will write a detailed proposal and then should contact them again.and then should contact them again. No update 2/5/2014.

Hassan reports that they  have established contact with people in Bahawalpur.  The contact person forwarded the request to higher authorities for approval of PingER deployment.

The contact at Sahiwal did the installation of PingER node by himself but data is not being collected, so we are in contact to resolve the   issue. Kashif believes he missed some Linux updates. Today is holiday here and he will do the trouble shooting on 6th FebHassaan  is working with Anjum to get contacts at Bahawalpur and Sahiwal. These are in central Pakistan towards the Eastern border and so should help with providing TULIP landmarks.

We are now gathering data from Pingerisl-air   and Quest

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Buitms                   Problem in hardware, they are trying to fix it. System Replacement Required

Cae                        Problem  with IP, they are trying to resolve it 

Duhs                      They are purchasing new servers in two week time 

Pingerisl-qau            Contact -qau        Contact person is still on liveleave. He is now busy in other pending works. 

Uaf                          Problem in system, visit approval for Faisalabad University in progress. Approved for 12th Feb

In addition we recovered 2 (see above) and lost 2.:

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  • Contact person is not attending
  • we have been unable to gather data from pinger.pern.edu.pk since Jan 13.

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  •  System not booting

TULIP - Raja

We have sent a reminder email to Yahoo giving them an update on TULIP and how it might be extended to meet their needs. There has been no response. Sent a follow up 1/31/2013They have responded, they appear to be interested. We are trying to interest them in providing landmarks.

Raja  uses the options feature of traceroute.pl to reduce the time for the PingER/perfSONAR landmarks to make the pings by a factor of 5. Given this we probably need to review the timeouts.we probably need to review the timeouts. Also we are now using caching and nightlty we populate the caches by a cronjob tracerouting to the PingER targets from SLAC, CERN, NUST, ICTP, UM and ICTP.  This also helps speed things up. 

Raja has used TULIP's geolocation to provide a Visual traceroute. It can be accessed via http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/tulip/.  It also shows the route as seen GeoIPTools and other methods. Several features have been added to speed it up: provide caching of router locations vs IP address, populate the cache by tracerouting to PingER nodes each night, the caching, and not bothering with regions where there are insufficient landmarks etc. 

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The annual PingER report for the International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA) is completed. It is available at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/xorg/icfa/icfa-net-paper-jan14/report-jan14.docx. We are working on a slide presentation to ICFA in Geneva, to be given by Harvey Newman.

Raja has also re-written the historical traceroute facility that takes nightly traceroutes and allows one to retrieve and compare them. He then extended it to use the reverse traceroute facility to provide histories for NUST, CERN, ICTP and UNIMAS as well as SLAC. See for example UM as well as SLAC. When the UNIMAS and UTM traceroutes work, we can include them.  See for example 

http://www-wanmon.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/traceroutearchive.cgi?from=

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pinger.fsktm.

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um.edu.

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my&to=

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monitor.seecs.

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edu.

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pk&date1=2014_

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02_

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02&date2=2014_

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02_

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03&date3=2014_

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02_04

31. 

Old Items

TULIP

The new beta test TULIP site is up and running and is at http://tulip.slac.stanford.edu. To first order (due to the number of landmarks available) it only works in N. America, Europe and Pakistan. Even then it is only accurate to a hundred or so km. It also will not work for targets that do not respond to pings or are connected via geo-stationary satellites.  Its main use at the moment maybe to find roughly the location, i.e. region/country/state,  a target is in. This is particularly useful for proxies and for routers (the latter are typically mis-found by GeoIPtools to be in the corporate HQ of the owner (e.g. Berkeley for ESnet routers). It would be really valuable if router owners provided DNS LOC records filled out.  

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He has also made some modifications on the ontology of the project (under supervision of his professor in Rio) hence he  will have to modify the code to load the data accordingly.

Renan has provided a 4 page Appendix on PingERLOD to the ICFA report.  This is also available at PingER LOD Overview

Raspberry Pi

A quick comparison of the performance of the two hosts (raspberry pi and regular UNIMAS host) without statistical quantification is available at https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Comparison+of+PinGER+RTTs+from+UNIMAS+monitors+N4+and+RASPBERRY.  A page has been created to compare the hardware spec between the pinger.unimas.my node (Intel architecture) and the pinger2.unimas.my node (Raspberry Pi ARM architecture), available from the unimas pinger website at http://pinger.unimas.my/pinger/hardware.php. There is a link to hardware.php in the Comparison+of+PinGER+RTTs+from+UNIMAS+monitors+N4+and+RASPBERRY web page.

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Anjum suggested Saqib,  Badrul and Johari put together a paper on user experiences with using the Internet in Malaysia as seen from Malaysian universities. In particular round trip time, losses, jitter, reliability, routing/peering, in particular anomalies, and the impact on VoIP, throughput etc.  It would be good to engage someone from MYREN.

Potential projects

See list of Projects

Future meeting  - Les

Next meeting Wednesday February 19th  2014 8:00pm Pacific Standard Time, Thursday February 20th 2014 9:00am Pakistan time, Thursday February 20th, 2014 noon Malaysian time, Thursday 20th February, 2014 02:00am Rio Standard Time.

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